BART rebound after big delay

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, February 10, 2000

After enduring whopper delays Wednesday morning, commuters breathed a sigh of relief as BART trains arrived on time early Thursday.

However, pre-dawn car commuters from the South Bay found a nightmare of their own. A trailer hauling a backhoe flipped over on U.S. 101 just south of the Interstate 280 interchange, blocking two lanes for more than an hour. Traffic was backed up for more than 2 miles, according to the California Highway Patrol. Shortly after 6 a.m., equipment arrived to right the upturned backhoe and remove it from the road.

BART engineers spent the night searching for clues that would explain why 31 electro-mechanical switching boxes shut down Wednesday morning, said BART spokesman Ron Rodriguez. The results of their investigation were not immediately available Thursday morning.

The malfunctions hurtled the morning commute into chaos in one of the worst delays on the BART system in a decade. More than 100,000 commuters were left stranded at stations waiting for their trains.

By Wednesday evening trains were running on time once again, and Thursday's pre-dawn commute went smoothly after the first BART train rolled out at 3:58 a.m., said BART's Fred Evans The boxes - known as MUXs - set the speed and direction of trains. Hundreds of the squat gray metal boxes are installed along tracks throughout the train system, he said.

Rodriguez said the boxes have a

Related Stories

built-in safety feature that causes them to shut down if anything goes wrong.

"Thirty-one of those puppies simply refused to work Wednesday morning," he said. "That is an exceptionally large number to go out at once. Ninety-nine percent of the time they work fine. If a couple go out, it's no big deal. The public would never notice."

But commuters noticed Wednesday when nearly three dozen of the boxes shut down at 7:30 a.m. on tracks serving five stations: MacArthur, Lake Merritt, West Oakland, 19th Street and 12th Street.

"If you look at a BART map, that's where all the trains come together," Rodriguez said. "There could not have been a worse place for them to shut down."

Despite the effort, there were massive traffic jams and restricted speeds throughout the system Wednesday morning.

"We don't try to do a repair that will get an 'A' in an electrical engineering class," Rodriguez said. "Our object is to move the trains and passengers. After hours, we do a real honest-to-god fix."

Kurt Wetzel, a financial analyst who works in San Francisco, left BART's Bay Point station at 7:17 a.m. Wednesday and didn't arrive in The City until 9:30 - 11/2 hours late for a meeting.

"I'm just a hostage to BART," said Wetzel, who lives in Antioch.

Wetzel said he called work from his cell phone on the train to notify everyone of his predicament.

"They understood," he said.

Later, Wetzel told BART what he thought.

"I sent them an e-mail saying that their (service) is just a joke, it's pathetic," said Wetzel, 36. "I've written to them several times when the trains are late just asking them to tell me why. But they never write back."

The evening commute went smoothly, he said.

"I think it was only a couple minutes delayed, nothing to really complain about," Wetzel said, speaking from his home. "This morning was a whopper though."

Rick Benaderet cooled his heels for 40 minutes in BART's Walnut Creek station Wednesday morning and missed the introduction and first 11/2 hours of a two-day finance class for Wells Fargo employees in The City.

Benaderet said the commute home was normal - 35 to 40 minutes from San Francisco, he said.

Laura Perry flew up from Los Angeles Wednesday morning and missed 11/2 hours of a conference in San Francisco due to train delays

at the Coliseum station.

"I called BART five minutes ago to make sure there were no more delays," Perry said during an interview in the Embarcadero station at 4:45 p.m. Wednesday. "They told me to expect a five-minute delay. I asked them if they were very sure, absolutely sure because I've got to catch a plane."

Adding to some commuter's woes Wednesday was a late morning slowdown in westbound traffic on the Bay Bridge, caused by the filming of a Mitsubishi car commercial along the upper deck.

The filming, which began at 11 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m., caused congestion during the first half hour of filming, said Jeff Weiss, a Caltrans spokesman.

In order to allow the film crew to shoot its commercial, the CHP blocked all lanes of traffic and drove across the bridge at 10 mph, cars collecting behind them.

When the slow-moving procession neared the film crew, the crew drove off the Treasure Island exit, returned to the entrance of the bridge and repeated the process.

Weiss said it took four or five takes to complete the filming.

Now Playing:

In hindsight, it would have been better to begin the filming at 11:30 when fewer cars are on the road, he said.

"It's not something we take lightly," Weiss said. "In fact, at first we rejected the permit request. We were persuaded by the California Film Commission to approve the permit when the film crew reduced their time frame. They had originally asked to film from 9 a.m. until 2:30 p.m." &lt;

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.